Monday, May 19, 2014

Ellen Birkett Morris writes poetry, fiction and short plays
from her home in Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in Antioch
Review, Sawmill Magazine, South Carolina Review, Notre Dame Review, and Santa Fe Literary
Review. Her story, “The Cycle of Life and Other Incidentals,” was selected
as a finalist in the Glimmer Train Press Family Matters short story
competition. Her ten-minute play, “Lost Girls,” was a finalist for the 2008 Heideman Award given by Actors Theatre
of Louisville and was given a staged reading at the Aronoff
Center in Cincinnati. Morris is the author of Surrender, a poetry
chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in journals
including Thin Air Magazine, Clackamas
Literary Review, Alimentum, Juked, Inscape, and Gastronomica. Her work won top poetry prize in The
Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition in 2008 and was Semi-finalist for Rita Dove Poetry
Award. Her poem, "Origins," was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart
Prize. Morris has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation,
Kentucky Foundation for Women and Kentucky Arts Council. She is a recipient of
a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction given by the Kentucky Arts Council.
Morris works as a public relations consultant and writes regularly forwww.authorlink.com.

* *
*

I've never met Ellen Birkett Morris, but I'd heard her name
as a fellow Kentucky writer. When she emailed to ask if she could send me a
copy of her poetry chapbook for review, I accepted her invitation.

—Karen L. George

(This interview was
conducted via email in April 2014.)

* * *

Your
bio mentions you not only write fiction in addition to poetry, but you won the
2013 Kentucky Arts Council’s Al Smith Fellowship for your fiction.
Congratulations—quite an honor. Have you written poetry for as long as
you’ve written fiction, and do you have a preference as to which you enjoy
more?

EBM:I started writing seriously in my
mid-thirties with the idea that if I didn’t do it now I never would. I started
with children’s fiction and found it was challenging to do all the things a
writer needs to do (plot, characterization, pacing, dialogue) and gear it
perfectly to children. I moved on to poetry and fiction for adults. I enjoy
writing them both equally. I think both forms demand attention to detail and
rhythm and insight into the human heart.

Do
you work on poetry and fiction projects at the same time, or do you work
exclusively on a poetry project until it’s finished and then turn to a fiction
project?

EBM:I do work on poetry and fiction concurrently,
but with a major focus on just one form. I may write a few poems while I am
developing a collection of linked stories or a few pieces of flash fiction
while I’m compiling a chapbook, but one genre always takes precedence.

What
do you find different and/or challenging about writing/revising poetry vs.
fiction?

EBM:I think the challenge in poetry lies in how
condensed it is. In fiction you have a lot of room to explain the situation,
but in poetry you have to put people there right away. Every word must count.
Every image needs to carry weight. I think revising is pretty much revising no
matter the genre.

Your
poems have a strong narrative voice, as well as great attention to detail and a
sense of place. Do you think this was developed and/or strengthened by
your fiction writing?

EBM:Thank you! I’m sure the fiction helps, but I
think it also has to do with my preference for being grounded in a place and
viewpoint when I write. I’ve done poetry and fiction workshops, and teachers
always stress the importance of detail and the power of using the particular to
help the reader reach a feeling of the universal.

I’ve
not read any of your fiction, but I’m curious if you write about totally
different, or similar, subjects in your fiction compared to your poetry?
And when you sit down to write about something, do you know right away whether
you will be writing a poem or a piece of prose, and have you ever started in
one form and then switched off to another? Or written about that subject
in both forms? Have you ever considered writing something that includes both
poetry and fiction?

EBM:A lot of my recent chapbook Surrender dealt
with loss and growing older. While I have some stories that center on these
themes, I tend to write fiction about what it means to see others and be seen,
what it means to really be known by another person. I think this is our central
struggle as humans and it comes across whether my stories are about a young
naïve soldier in Iraq or a woman who accidently finds her way into a breast
feeders group.

I never know
what a piece will be when I sit down to write. It really is a process of
discovery. I had a story from my childhood of watching SNL with my father and
seeing Mick Jagger lean over and lick Keith Richards on the lips. My dad was
disgusted and I was fascinated. I thought it was an essay and tried to write it
as such. Finally I figured out that it was a poem (titled “The Divide”) that
went back through the generations—the Shadow on the radio, Elvis shaking his
hips and then Jagger and Richards.

I have
written about a subject in two forms before. I had a monologue called “Lost
Girls” that was published in The Pedestal Magazine as fiction that I later
turned into a ten-minute play that was a finalist for the Heideman Award given
by Actor’s Theatre.

I think I
would be well suited to develop something in hybrid short form. Short form
writing is really popular now with works like Bluets and Dept. of
Speculationgaining attention.

How
do you think writing poetry affects your fiction writing and vice versa?

EBM:I think writing poetry has helped me hone
certain aspects of my fiction writing, such as rhythm and word choice. I
recently graduated from the low residency MFA program at Queens University in
Charlotte, NC and my professors there weren’t surprised that I wrote poetry
when they read my prose, which they described as “spare and poetic.”

Many
of your poems have a deep connection to the natural world (they contain birds,
horses, dogs, bodies of water, trees and plants.) Did you grow up in the
country and/or do you currently live in a country rather than urban setting?

EBM:This must come from the poetic tradition
because I am a city girl. I was born in Louisville and have lived in Lexington
and Cincinnati. I really think this comes from paying attention, because nature
is all around us, even in the city. I also think that nature is a great vehicle
for poets to carry meaning and image simultaneously.

There
are several consecutive poems near the center of the book, “Fatherless Girls,”
“Hollow Bones,” and “August Leaves,” that contain no punctuation except for one
or two commas. I have an idea why poets might choose to do this, but can
you talk about why you chose to eliminate punctuation in those poems?

EBM:I think this had largely to do with the flow
of the words. I wanted the sentiments to pour out with brief interruptions for
emphasis, and I think the commas achieved that.

In
many poems you use second person, addressing a “you” in the poem. I’m
wondering about that decision, because I wrote a whole collection of poems
exclusively in second person, but in workshops I’ve had people react
differently to that choice, some bothered by it because they feel uncomfortable
as if you’re addressing them and the situation of the poem doesn’t apply to
them. Others readers like it. What is your opinion on that, and can you
say why you chose to use it?

EBM:I feel as if the “you” serves to draw readers
in and also lends an air of authority to the poems. I am thinking of David
Foster Wallace’s short story “Forever Overhead” in which a second person voice
is used to convey the gravity of coming of age as a boy prepares to jump off a
diving board on his 13th birthday.

The
preceding question brings me to a sometimes touchy subject. The series of
poems in the center of your collection refer to and/or address a “you” that I
assumed was your father, partly because of clues in the poems themselves and
partly because of your book’s dedication note—“In loving memory of John
Birkett.” But I know that many poets write persona poems, exploring people and
situations they may or may not have experienced themselves. And as a reviewer,
I often choose to refer to the poem’s POV person as the poem’s narrator rather
than the poet themselves, because it feels too intrusive and/or presumptuous to
do otherwise. What are your feelings about this?

EBM:The “you” of those poems was my father, who
died in 2009. I spent many years honing my writing before I experienced the
hard life experiences that made me feel like I had something important to say.
I have also used “you” as the poem’s narrator (persona poem), as in the poem “Your Mother.” The lines go: "Tell
me again about your mother. / Tell me how you held her hand, / limp with
fatigue, half-dead." I’m not so much worried about whether a poem is
autobiographical or not, but whether the details are authentic and moving.

On a
similar subject, in “Detroit Skyline” you speak of a “you” looking like your
grandson, so I assumed you were speaking of your father, though again it could
be a persona poem. Further in the poem you say, “You…write books.” I hope
it’s okay to ask if your father was a writer, and if you feel you inherited an
interest in writing from him? I also ask this because one of the recurring
themes in Surrender is a reverence for ancestors.

EBM:My father wrote detective fiction novels set
in and around the racetrack. Louisville and Lexington served as backdrops for
his books The Queen’s Mare and The Last Private Eye, both will be
reissued as e-books this fall. He passed on his love of literature by taking me
and my sisters to the library and reading to us when we were kids. I actually
remember him reading Flannery O’ Connor stories to us when I was around eight.
I also got to see how challenging and all consuming the work of writing could
be. He sat at our kitchen table every afternoon typing away, so I knew it
wasn’t a glamorous job, but felt driven to do it anyway.

Who
are some of the poets who have influenced you, and can you say in what ways
they have influenced you? What poets/collections are you reading now?

EBM:I like the work of Ted Kooser for the
simplicity of it and also the way that he can animate inanimate objects through
his poetry. I played around with that idea in my poem “Everything Must Go.” I
think W. S. Merwin is amazing. The cadence of his poems are beautiful, and he
writes about important things. I have always loved Jane Kenyon, particularly
the poem “Otherwise,” which uses repetition beautifully and focuses on the
importance of the everyday. Right now, I am reading Mary Ann Reese’s Down
Deep and loving it.

What
writing projects are you currently working on? Do you have any books
forthcoming?

EBM:I have a set of linked short stories set in a
fictional eastern Kentucky town in the mid-70s which is under consideration
with an editor right now. I am also putting the finishing touches on a chapbook
manuscript that I hope to send out soon.

Karen George lives in Northern Kentucky. Since she retired from
computer programming to write full-time, she has enjoyed traveling to historic
river towns, mountain country, and her first European trip. Her
chapbook, Into the Heartland, was released byFinishing
Line Press in 2011, and her chapbook, Inner
Passage, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. You can find her work in Memoir, The
Louisville Review, Tupelo Press 30/30 Website, Wind, Border Crossing,
Permafrost, Blast Furnace, Adanna,and Still. Sheis co-founder and fiction editor
of the online literary and arts journal, Waypoints.

I've never met Ellen Birkett Morris, but I'd heard her name as a fellow
Kentucky writer. When she emailed to ask if she could send me a copy of her
poetry chapbook for review, I accepted her invitation.

—Karen L. George

__________

Review
of Ellen Birkett Morris' Surrender

Ellen
Birkett Morris writes poetry, fiction and short plays from her home in
Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in Antioch Review, Sawmill
Magazine, South Carolina Review, Notre
Dame Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review. Her story, “The Cycle of
Life and Other Incidentals,” was selected as a finalist in the Glimmer Train
Press Family Matters short story competition. Her ten-minute play, “Lost
Girls,” was a finalist for the 2008 Heideman Award
given by Actors Theatre of Louisville and was given a
staged reading at the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati. Morris
is the author of Surrender, a poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press.
Her poetry has appeared in journals including Thin Air Magazine, Clackamas Literary Review, Alimentum,
Juked, Inscape,
and Gastronomica. Her work won top poetry prize
in The Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition in 2008 and was Semi-finalist for Rita Dove
Poetry Award. Her poem, "Origins," was nominated for the 2006
Pushcart Prize. Morris has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation,
Kentucky Foundation for Women and Kentucky Arts Council. She is a recipient of
a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction given by the Kentucky Arts Council.
Morris works as a public relations consultant and writes regularly forwww.authorlink.com.

The
poems in Ellen Birkett Morris' debut poetry chapbook, Surrender,
resonate with the emotional intensity of longing, compassion, tenderness, and
reverence around the many types of surrender we experience inevitably as humans.
The poems move from childhood through adulthood, using various forms (tercets,
quatrains, prose poems), held together by common tones and themes such as love,
loss, and reverence for our roots.

The
opening poem, "Everything Must Go," refers to the sign at a garage
sale. The narrator describes one item for sale:"The electric blue bathing suit / hangs from a post." The poem
has a wistful, nostalgic mood set by the image "The chest juts out, a
trick of wind / or padding," and how the narrator imagines the teen who once
wore the swimsuit: "...open / face, honeyed braids, long legs, her bare / feet
with toenails painted pink." The poet also invites us deeper with the
phrase "inviting me / to look at what others had cast aside." "Cast
aside" refers literally to getting rid of this old item of clothing, but
also hauntingly suggests people, places, and things outgrown, rejected, or
surrendered to through the years. The title, "Everything Must Go,"
foreshadows the stories of loss and letting go in the poems that follow, by
implying that eventually everything in life must go. The poem's sense of
longing is intensified by the repeated long "a," "e," and "o" sounds that
make the reader wonder what memories this garage sale has churned up in the
narrator.

Morris
writes about some of the surrenders many experience as teens:in "Sixteen" surrendering to an
awakening of sexual desire, and in "Down by the Lake" where kids
surrender to getting high.

In
"Surrender," the title poem of the book, the narrator surrenders her
daughter to the school bus, feeling "invisible," her "white
T-shirt a flag of surrender. / Surrendered to love, / I leave my daughter at
the curb." And this image of the mother sending her daughter off is
beautifully paired with the reverse image at the end of the poem —her
daughter waving to her mother "as she sends me off into the world."

This
connection of a mother to a daughter is also the subject of the prose poem,
"Measurements," in which a daughter remembers how her mother hand-measured
ingredients, and "When the time came, she taught me her tricks. No shiny
measuring cup could match the glory of my mother's words as I dropped my first
handful of flour into the bowl. Perfect.
Just perfect."

The
poems "The Movies" and "Louisville, KY, USA" celebrate the
surrender involved in romantic love. "The Movies" ends beautifully
with two people who have been in a relationship for many years we suspect, coming
home from a movie and making love. The poet portrays them as totally
comfortable with each other, snuggling:

...We lay in our warm
bed, sheets

soft with age, and watched the
leaves cast

shadows on the bedroom wall.

There
is such comfort and tenderness in the image of "sheets soft with
age," because besides being literal it suggest the couple's relationship
has softened as it matured.The last
image of leaf shadows can be interpreted as both beautiful and at the same time
a foreshadowing perhaps of darker times that come into everyone's life, which
will be dealt with in later poems.

"Louisville,
KY, USA" also has the same wistful, drowsy feel of the "The
Movies," of two people who have lived and loved together for many years,
waking together "in our familiar bed, / warm with Saturday sleep."
This poem also portrays the narrator's surrender or acceptance of the fact that
her partner is aging, as she is, by referring to "your gray chest
hair...wrinkles around your eyes," and the lovely ending line, "we
lie together slowing." The "together slowing" suggests both the
image of their heart rates slowing after lovemaking, and the idea of slowing
down in other ways as a result of aging.

The
chapbook's central theme of surrender is carried in poems of loved ones as they
age, become ill, and die. In "Your Mother" the poem's narrator asks
her husband to tell her about his mother. The poem is written in second person,
addressing the husband as "you," which creates a lovely sense of intimacy
between the poem's characters, but also between the narrator and the reader,
and the husband and his aging mother who's in a nursing home. At the poem's
center is the haunting image of "old people propped this way or that, /
like brooms in a closet, waiting to be chosen." This is such an effective
image because as sad as it is to envision these people doing nothing but
waiting to die, "waiting to chosen" also suggests to me a kind of
hope, that they've lived their lives and are ready to move on to the next phase,
whatever that might be. And brooms also denote something useful and essential,
perhaps alluding to the fact that these nursing home residents the poet
describes as "smiling, sad-eyed or dreaming" have moved pat their
years of having a purpose. "Your Mother," as so many other poems in Surrender,
is filled with tenderness and reverence for our roots, the places and people
who have nourished us, as seen in the second stanza:

How you brushed her long grey hair.

Then held up a mirror,
smiling,

As she once
did for you.

This
tenderness accompanied with sadness continues in the poem "Leaving,"
in which the husband empties "his boyhood home." The poem ends with
lines full of longing emphasized by the repeated use of the consonant
"l":

The fall light is filled with golden
dust,

dried leaves, ash, the yellow of
goodbye.

The
"yellow of goodbye" mirrors the mother's tea roses of the preceding
lines, which the poet says were "started with a cutting / from her
mother's garden." This image is both beautiful and sad in itself, but I
also wondered if the husband and wife in this poem took any cuttings of the
roses, to keep the tradition going, and since that's never mentioned in the
poem, that omission intensified the poem's sadness for me. The poem takes place
in the fall of the year, which also echoes what the reader feels is the
impending death of the mother. At the poem's center the wife surrenders to
letting her husband surrender to the experience of emptying his mother's house,
lines that effectively use repetition:

I ache to
touch

my husband, but leave him to his
leaving.

Surrender contains
a series of poems in which the narrator deals with the loss and letting go of
her father —one of the most difficult kinds of surrender we experience
as humans. In "Your Last Day" she describes his death in the moving
last four lines:

...felt
free to go. Two hours later

you gave a final exhalation.

It was a sigh, really.

A sigh.

The
way the above lines are laid out on the page, each one shorter, creates a
winding-down effect visually that mirrors the father's last breaths, that
though certainly sad, also contains a beauty, a peacefulness echoed in the
repeated "sigh." The poet's use of the word "sigh" is an
example of how much a poet can pack in one word, because sighing, letting one's
breath out audibly, can suggest sorrow, weariness, regret or relief. People
sigh with yearning, or in response to someone or something beautiful, such as a
work of art or music. The word "sigh" also echoes back to the
chapbook's title, Surrender, as in letting go of breath, in this case
the father's final breath, in which the poet also masterfully suggests (without
saying it) the daughter's accompanying sigh.

In
both "Fatherless Girls" and "Hollow Bones" the daughter of
the poem speaks to her recently deceased father in second person, addressing
him as "you," again creating a breathtaking feeling of intimacy. In
"Fatherless Girls" the daughter imagines heat lightning as
"Those small fires you set just to say hello," and in "Hollow
Bones" she muses that if her father had "hollow bones" like a
crow:

...I could lift you from your bed

Carry you outside to feel the sun

See the clouds drift across the sky

Watch the shadows lengthen

The
very next line in "Hollow Bones," that follows the above image of
rising and light is one of falling and darkness: "But you fall into a
darkness I cannot penetrate." This poem, as others in the book,
effectively use contrasting images of light and darkness.This poem, as many others, also
establishes the poet's connection and appreciation of the natural world and its
cycles which echo human life cycles. For example, in the elegiac poem
"August Leaves" the narrator walks by a lake, remembering her father.
The opening lines contain lilting sounds of repeated consonants, making it
sound like both a dirge and a lullaby:

August leaves

Singed around the edges

Slow baked by summer sun

Float in the air

Land in the quarry lake

I pace the shallow water

Lines
like the above emphasize the duality of life, how sometimes opposing sensations
are intricately connected —joy and sorrow, pain and beauty
—especially
at times such as the death of a parent, when we're most vulnerable and yet
these times are often when we grow the most as humans.

The
theme of reverence for your ancestry, first introduced in the second poem,
"Measurements," carries
through the book in poems such as "Detroit Skyline,"
"Oxblood," "Man Without a Country," and "Stones in My
Pocket." In "Oxblood" the narrator's memory of one of her
ancestors, perhaps a grandfather, is brought back by "the mention of shoe
polish." She remembers his "wooden / caddy. The bristled brush...tins
of polish, the deep red / my favorite. Oxblood...The
soft clothes like diapers." These concrete images of sight, sound, and
smell ground the poem and bring it alive, present to the senses much in the
same way objects such as old photos can bring back people, places, and events
as if they were present."Detroit
Skyline" is just such a poem based on a photograph:

You look straight into
the camera,

squinting against the
sun, hair blown

by the wind, the Detroit
skyline behind you.

You are eight. The city
is king.

Summer afternoons are
endless.

The
simplicity of the last two above lines are so powerful, creating a staccato
effect that echoes the starkness of the city behind the "you" in the
photograph, suggesting the "head-on" way he experiences life.

In
this chapbook's second last poem, "Stones in My Pocket," the narrator
travels to the land of her ancestors:

...My
father gone but a year,

I go in search of
ghosts, track his namesake across the water.

The journey of seven
hours took my people seven weeks

In a famine ship.

The
connection to the past, and reverence for her ancestors continues into the
narrator's own imagined future in the poem's beautiful closing lines:

I can only hope that
someone from the future

Will seek my name on a
gravestone,

Look out at the land,
imagine me there,

Feel the wind on her
face like the breath

Of a loved one as he
leans in for one last kiss.

This
image of "one last kiss" hauntingly mirrors the mother's kiss in
"Your Mother" and the breath of the father in "August
Leaves" and "Tour Last Day."

The
last poem, "Inheritance," goes back in time to the couple's wedding
day, and a later realization of what they inherited:"The deep strain of melancholy / that
runs through our genes." This poem and the book ends with the following
haunting image that echoes back to other mentions of shadows in earlier poems
such as "The Movies":

As a shadow staggers in
the doorway

Returned not to
celebrate or mourn,

But to curse the day we
were born.

This
image is a powerful contrast to the poem's preceding image of joy and promise
of the wedding celebration: "Drunk with abundance, weaving / Arm in arm to
the music we sway" — a fitting end to a book full of
life's dualities and dichotomies:love
and loss, abundance and illness, birth and death, connection and disconnection.

Ellen
Birkett Morris' Surrender draws us into places, times, and spaces
splendid with the beauty of the natural world, entangled by the surrenders of
our lives as humans, luminous with yearning, tenderness and awe.

_________________________________________

Karen
George lives in Northern Kentucky. Since she retired from computer
programming to write full-time, she has enjoyed traveling to historic river
towns, mountain country, and her first European trip. Her chapbook, Into
the Heartland, was released byFinishing Line Press
in 2011, and her chapbook, Inner
Passage, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. You can find her work in Memoir, The
Louisville Review, Tupelo Press 30/30 Website, Wind, Border
Crossing, Permafrost, Blast Furnace, Adanna,and Still. Sheis co-founder and fiction editor of the online literary and arts
journal, Waypoints.

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